1968 Chevelle Malibu as we found her

The saga begins April 2003

January 2007

Sometimes when you least expect it, an opportunity suddenly
appears. That was the case in April 2003 when my Friend Doug told me about a 68 Chevelle that
was available. We had no idea what we were going to look at. When we saw the car
we were happy to see that it was a two door no post but at first look it was pretty rough.
The car had been sitting partially disassembled for the last ten years. It's a
good thing we are in Arizona or this thing would have been a basket case. No
front seats, no front fender, no engine, bags of screws in the trunk and weeds
growing throughout. Then we started to notice that the rust was mainly just
surface stuff, all of the script was in the car along with 95% of the trim. The bumpers
were not perfect but they were not too far from it either. So we paid the man
$100 and got the title. A quick trip to DMV the next day and within a half hour
I had a clean title. The guy I bought the car from never transferred it into his
name, there was still an old lien listed on the title from GMAC so I believe I am the second
titled owner of this car. One more thing that is interesting about this
car, it is a first day car from the Atlanta factory!

Well enough of that, take a look
below to see pictures I took when we first saw the car. Then you can
take a look at the restoration process as it occurs and hopefully sometime in
the next few months (maybe years) I will have the car completed (are they ever really
completed) and get lots of pictures posted. I want to thank the folks at Shelves
That Slide for all the help and the web space to get me started. If
you need a top quality pull out shelf make sure to take a look at their site. It was decided that rather than restore the car to what it was we
would build the car to what we wanted. Please browse our site and check
out the progress

This is how she looked the first time we saw her

You can click on any of the pictures below for a
better look

So now I had to
make a choice as to what we were going to do with this car and it's
restoration. Was there any value in the low production number and would
I need to do a "proper" restoration? The answer came pretty
quickly with help from the people at Team
Chevelle.
The original engine was not in the car so true matching numbers was out
of the question. As Thad put it "I can't imagine a 307
(original or not) adding value to anything ".
So the decision was made, no concourse restoration here! So
exactly what was I looking for, or maybe just as importantly what did my
son Kyle want out of this car? Well that was what I thought mattered but
soon we were spending way too much for this to be given to a 17 year old
to drive.